Review: Pentium 4 at 1,4, 1,5 and 1,6 GHz

Intel's Pentium 4 was designed from scratch with highly innovative technology. But was that effort enough to beat AMD's Athlon? We benchmarked the Pentium 4 at 1400, 1500 and even at 1600 MHz.

Related story in english: Review of the new Athlon with DDR-SDRAM.

Latest sales figures for the CPU business tell one thing very clearly: AMDs Athlon eats quite something out of Intels pie. Even the readers of tecChannel.de follow along these lines. In a recent survey with over 1300 participants more than 80 percent stated their next system will be powered by an Athlon.

Even before throwing the first benchmark at Intels new CPU it is clear who runs the highest clockspeed after November 20, 2000: Intel launches the Pentium 4 at 1400 and 1500 MHz, while Athlon only recently reached 1200 MHz. As already reported by tecChannel.de AMD demoed an Athlon at 1500MHz at Comdex, but it only was a prototype that will go into production in four months at the earliest.

But there's more to it than clockspeed. In our test we compared the new Pentium 4 to its now little brother Pentium III and the Athlon. In addition to the shipping clockspeed we can also give you all the benchmarks for a Pentium 4 running at 1600 MHz.

Our special report Details on the Pentium 4 .will provide you with all the further details of the new technology of Pentium 4. Unfortunately this feature will only be available in German for the time being, please bear with us. Our international readers may however turn to the functional schematics of this new microprocessor.